Store nuclear waste on reservation? Tribe split

Small tribe, strong feelings
Once, more than 20,000 Goshutes roamed across Utah and Nevada. Now there are only about 500, including the 118 belonging to the Skull Valley Band, according to Bear.

Fewer than two dozen, including children, still live in the cluster of homes and trailers a few hundreds yards off the single highway that cuts through the reservation. Most of the households are below the national poverty level.

At the tribe’s only commercial building, the “Pony Express Store” and gas station, the sign is missing several letters and the clerk talks on the phone with little suggestion any customers will be arriving soon.

Some of the economic benefits from the proposed dump are already visible. Amid the old, dilapidated houses are a half-dozen new modular homes — some still waiting to be put on foundations — thanks to money from PFS. Bear lives in one, another belongs to his brother and a third to the vice chair of the tribe’s executive council, also a strong supporter of the waste dump.

Two of Bear’s neighbors and sharpest critics — Margene Bullcreek and Sammie Blackbear — have not been offered new homes, says an attorney representing Bullcreek. Blackbear lives in a small trailer just across the road from the new homes.

“It’s entirely environmental racism,” says Bullcreek, a 59-year-old grandmother. “You have large corporations wanting to put the nuclear waste that nobody wants in their back yards on our land.”

Bear maintains that the tribe approved the waste project in 1996, before the BIA approved it in March 1997 in a decision that itself has been questioned by dump opponents. A local BIA superintendent, David Allison, approved the lease only three days after receiving the final document.

Allison, now retired, defends his decision and says there were months of discussions as the lease was being developed. “Unquestionably it’s to the benefit of the tribe,” he said in a telephone interview.

He acknowledged the issue is “a very political hot potato” and added, “I’ve even been threatened over this thing.”

Leadership battle
Anger over the waste dump has spilled over to a bitter dispute over tribal leadership. Bear’s chairmanship expired in 2004, but Bullcreek says he has skirted new elections by repeatedly claiming the lack of a quorum before everyone has arrived at meetings.

A lawsuit challenging Bear’s leadership and the BIA lease approval was dismissed by a federal court in Salt Lake City.

Three years ago, Blackbear and two other nuclear dump opponents assumed leadership of the tribal council and began using its funds. The BIA never recognized them and they were arrested for theft and received probation.

Last year Bear faced embezzlement charges and agreed to return $31,500 to the tribe. He also pleaded guilty to one count of tax evasion. “We don’t believe the (tribal) chairmanship is a job,” he said, explaining why he didn’t pay taxes on his income as tribal leader. “Apparently the feds don’t feel that way.”

Steel canisters, chemical neighbors
The radioactive spent fuel rods are now kept in pools of water or in concrete containers at power plants. At Skull Valley, they will be kept in steel canisters inside concrete enclosures resting atop a concrete slab.

A private security force will be at the site with double fences cordoning off the inner 100 acres where the waste will be kept. PFC officials say the facility will comply fully with NRC security requirements.

Toole County, Utah, which surrounds the reservation, is anything but pristine.

A few miles to the east over the Stansbury Mountain range, the government is storing and burning nerve gas and other chemical agents. To the south is the Dugway Proving Ground, where the government uses chemical and biological agents in tests. Toward the northwest are private landfills holding hazardous, toxic and low-level radioactive waste. And not far away on the Great Salt Lake is a magnesium plant once ranked by the Environmental Protection Agency as the nation’s No. 1 toxic polluter.

Skull Valley itself has long been viewed as a bit foreboding. In the late 19th century, the state located its only leper colony there.

Bullcreek, nonetheless, argues that becoming the country’s storehouse for nuclear waste — “This poison,” she calls it — is contrary to Goshute tradition. “It will destroy the harmony we have, the tranquility that we have in our valley.”

Bear scoffs at the dissent.

“We’ve got to live today,” he says. “We can’t go back and live like the old days. You can’t feed your children, you can’t feed your family that way.”

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